This week’s free Photoshop brush is “Will Do” a cottony soft charcoal brush that can build to a full, more textured fill. This brush is a good soft shader when used with a light touch as it has a powdery softness and can be used to build up tones quite lightly.

A cat seemed a fitting subjects and I attempted a drawing of my old friend Charlie, who through my clumsy stylus work seems to have turned from a grey 18 year old (at the time of the reference photo I used) into a bit of a calico kitten, but no matter, I think his essence is still in there. You can download this week’s free Photoshop brush until next Monday when, as always, there will be a new one waiting for you at grutbrushes.com/freebrush

This was sketched with ‘Kays Way’ the newest arrival in the brush shop today. It’s a fibrous natural media brush that is wiry and scratchy at the lowest pressure but gets soft and wooly at the highest stylus pressure. This highly textured pastel brush has low coverage making it a good impressionistic shader.
grutbrushes.com/shop/

Sometimes a soft brush with no context, nothing to compare it to, can just appear as smudged, faded or even just out of focus. What I like about this week’s brush is that while it has a softness to it, it also has lots of sharp grainy ‘bits’ in it, which depending on the background, appear to be either paper flaws or flaky deposits of pigment. It’s digital after all so what they really are, is up to you.

You can download this week’s free Photoshop brush until next Monday when, as always, there will be a new brush.

A sharp fine grained charcoal brush with a fairly wide range of coverage fom light to dark. This round-tipped charcoal brush starts with a fine grain at low texture and though it’s width is fairly fixed it has a darker slightly thicker grain at full stylus pressure.[/twocol_one_last]

As always, you can download it from the brush shop or the member’s free Photoshop brush page for free until the end of this week (May 24) when there will be a new free brush.
Drawn with the “Mid Yewer” Photoshop Charcoal Brush.

New in the store today, Roadside Tip is a rough granular charcoal which starts with a powdery coverage at the lightest pressure and moves into a wetter, almost oily grit fill at higher pressure. Though the square shaped tip scales with pressure this brush is best suited to broad gestural sketches or strong tonal blocking.[/twocol_one_last]

This charcoal or chalk brush is more flexible and fungible than some of the more recent brushes in that it is has a very soft fingerprint at low pressure. With a single stroke you get very light coverage which makes shading easy as you can easily control the amount of colour and by building it up with multiple stokes it’s possible to create areas of light colour blend into very dark sections without visible brush strokes. This maintains a sharp texture like you would have with chalk or charcoal on heavy textured paper without the smudginess that you would get using a stump or tortillion in traditional media.

A hard charcoal with a light coverage that makes it ideal for shading with a crisp texture. With repeated strokes this brush can give you full dark coverage with lots of opportunity for graduated blending.

“Clay Remains” is a companion to the recently added “Tailors Mane” pastel brush. Similar in tone but thicker in coverage and more powdery at light pressure. If you push lightly it has a bit of a blender effect, a bit like rubbing the page with you finger.